Cousins Talking
Do we dare to speak the secrets our mothers told us to keep?
My Grandma’s family complete with nanny right before her mother left them.
When I was fourteen, there was a mossy spot down under the rhododendron trees where I liked to lay on my stomach and read. The lime green moss was several inches thick and softer than a shag carpet. The rhodies, whether they were blooming with pink and lavender flowers or blending into the woods, provided shelter from the rain and younger siblings who might interrupt my reading. I called it my secret fort, and spent many peaceful hours from the age of nine to fourteen languishing on my mossy bed. But one day something happened that I have never told anyone until this year.
I had two cousins—brothers who spent a lot of time with my family during those years. The younger one was my age, while the other was two years older. The younger was into martial arts from a young age. He loved to teach the rest of us his moves. He taught us how to block a hit and twist our arms if anyone tried to grab us with both hands. These moves worked. My siblings and I had practiced because Steve insisted.
While I adored Steve, I always felt uneasy around his older brother. When I was fourteen, I was reading Little Town on the Prairie, enjoying the tale of Laura and Almanzo’s courtship when someone grabbed me from behind, rolled me over and lay on top of me. It was my cousin Rob. Nausea washed over me as he grabbed one of my breasts, then started to push his body into mine. No one had ever touched me like this before. I tried to fight him off, but he grabbed my hands and held them down as I struggled to get out from under him. Then I remembered what his brother taught me, so I twisted my wrists and he lost control of my hands. I kneed him in the groin, broke free, and ran up the hill, leaving my book behind.
When I got to the house, my heart was racing and my hands were shaking. I found my mom alone in her bedroom and told her what happened. Momma’s response to my story was, “Stay inside the house until they leave, but don’t ever tell anyone what happened.” That was fine with me. I felt shame and terror. I was afraid to go outside the rest of the day until my cousins drove back to Seattle where they lived. I never told another soul what happened—not my sisters or Steve or my father or uncle. I kept silent because it seemed the safest option. Keeping silent spared me from immediate embarrassment, but it intensified my shame.
I was an obedient daughter. I kept that secret for several decades. I kept it such a secret that I never even thought of myself as a survivor of incest or attempted rape until during the “me too” movement, when I told my counselor.
My counselor’s response was, “At what point would you measure an act of sexual abuse? Does it require sex? A broken bone? A mark on the skin? A pregnancy?”
It was only then that I began to realize that despite my ability to fight off my attacker, that encounter, fleeting as it was had been, had changed me. It made me afraid of guys. My mother’s words made me afraid to speak up because there was a sense that my voice wasn’t strong enough and no one would believe me. I came out of this experience not trusting men and not trusting my voice. And I felt shame. Shame for being touched in a yucky way by my cousin and childhood playmate and shame for carrying that secret when I met men later in life. I also felt shame surrounding my sexuality. If this was such a dirty secret—what kind of person was I to enjoy sex later with my husband?
There are women who have been sexually abused for years or suffered violent rapes by strangers. There are people—both men and women who have been harmed beyond anything I can imagine. I don’t tell this story for pity or because I feel like a victim—I tell it because it was a creepy experience made worse by the decree to keep silent. And sadly keeping silent was a legacy handed down to me by my mother who received it from her mother and who knows for how many generations.
My mother told me to keep silent because that’s what her mother told her and my grandmother kept secrets to protect her father. Secrets surrounding events that I was once convinced had never happened, but now that I’ve connected to my women cousins through the family tree, I’ve begun to see things differently.
The census of 1930 followed a chaotic year after the stock market crash spun Americans from the decadent roaring twenties into the Great Depression. This record reveals the last time my Grandmother’s family was intact.
As the first born, Grandma Veronica was 13 and her youngest brother was two. She told me that her mother abandoned the family when she was twelve or thirteen. Others heard that great grandmother Jessie had a nervous breakdown and put her children into a care home when her youngest son was two.
As her mother entered a hospital, my grandma Veronica despised how she and her siblings were treated in this abusive children’s home and never forgave her mother for this disruption in their lives.
As the oldest, Veronica was able to leave this horrible home after a year or two and went back to live with her father. When she was fifteen, Jessie collected the younger kids and came home, but all was not well in the household.
My Grandma as a teenager
Jessie called upon the police to investigate why her husband had no interest in her and the investigation discovered that Veronica’s father had molested her. This news is difficult to believe nearly a hundred years later. Everyone in the family worshipped great grandfather. He was kind man and gentle in his ways. He was also a Christian and God-fearing men aren’t supposed to molest their daughters.
My mother never heard about this and my Grandmother never spoke about it. What I know is that my Grandma and most of the family despised Great Grandma Jessie for abandoning her family and divorcing Great Granddad.
Most of John and Jessie’s descendants knew nothing about this story until some stranger added newspaper articles to our great grandfather’s Wikipedia page. Whether these papers tell the truth or not, it’s hard to prove, but by their accounts my grandmother and great grandmother reported this abuse and my great grandfather admitted to it. So the reports have three people agreeing that this happened. There is also a fourth witness. My grandmother’s brother told his wife that he witnessed his father molesting his sister through a knothole in the wall. Four people in this family declared the account was true—yet no one alive today heard about it.
Even worse, my great grandfather, who was an astronomer and telescope lens maker was considered so important to the scientific community that seven universities pled with the judge to let him stay out of prison. Some even suggested that he be castrated for the sake of science. One scientist Dr. Frost—the head of Yerkes Observatory (who had helped to bring my grandmother into this world at birth) stated that her father was just overworked and had made a mistake. Such was the value of a girl’s life in 1932.
So much animosity exists toward Jessie even today that many think she lied. She was known for tricking and lying. Did grandmother Jessie make this up? Then why would her husband and daughter and a son all agree with the charges?
And why would my Grandmother blame her mother and continue to adore her father for the rest of her life? Why didn’t she at least tell her story and warn her daughters that such things could happen?
The paradox of having a courageous heart is that it requires you to name things that are not kind, not loving and not restored. We need honesty. -Dan Allender
And this was not the end of the story. Two years later, great grandmother left her children in Oklahoma with her next man while she traveled to South Dakota. During that time my Grandma’s next oldest sister became pregnant from this man who molested the girls. By the 1940 census, Great grandmother is divorced and was claiming her second daughter’s son as her own.
My Grandmother’s secrets fed my mother’s shame which allowed my mother to stand by while I was beaten with a belt and refused a high school education. My mother told me to keep these secrets too. She expected me to keep these secrets long after I left home. She expected me to keep them for life, but one day when I was forty-five, I cracked and decided to write my memoir.
Today I see how keeping the family secrets has affected many women in my family. There are hushed stories of incest on both sides. Young girls pregnant and called rebellious when all they craved was love. Expectations to marry a man and put up with physical abuse because being married made an honest woman of them, but where was the honest truth? Secrets and shame have chained many women to the men who hurt them and their daughters.
In the film “Women Talking,” a group of women discuss how to deal with multiple rapes in their religious community. Their three options include—
1 Do nothing
2 Stay and fight or
3 Leave
My Great grandmother Jessie chose to leave and paid for her choice. She had angry children who despised her for disrupting their lives. Because she worried about what people thought, she reacted every time she felt their rejection by playing favorites and shunning anyone who disobeyed her. This power struggle destroyed her relationships. Many saw her as selfish and hateful. I myself saw her as narcissistic, but now I wonder if she wasn’t terribly misunderstood and insecure. She lived in a world where she could not even have a bank account without her husband’s signature.
Great grandmother Jessie had asked for one thing in the ad she placed for a husband—that he spend his time with her alone. She got a man who fathered a child with the nanny and molested her daughter.
Jessie’s striving for power might have been the result of feeling powerless. She was after all blamed for reporting what happened. It’s unpopular to speak the truth especially in a world where a man molesting his daughter was excused due to him working too hard to provide for his family. Where can a woman or a girl be believed? When women are not supported in telling the truth, they keep secrets—secrets that in telling might also set them free. But when to speak, when to fight, and when to leave? As the film, “Women Talking,” demonstrates, the choice is not a simple one.
As it was, I’ve felt my mother and grandmother’s shame my entire life. I carried it in my genes. I felt it in my mother’s fears and in my Grandmother’s shame and in my great grandmother’s despair. I sensed there was a story here that I was never told which contributed our shame and pain through at least four generations, but I never knew what it was until my cousins and I began to talk.
Little Red Survivor Tips is always free. It’s just my thoughts about surviving at the intersection of family, narcissistic and religious abuse, and current events.
I also wrote a book Chasing Eden, about my strange childhood.
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This is so common! My grandmother was abused by her father and thought she was the only one, but all of her sisters also carried their shame, one of them even carrying a child that none of the others knew about until a DNA test revealed the connection. Some of the sisters ended up marrying men who went on to abuse their daughters. My grandmother married a philander and she was the one who abused my mom. But it stopped with my mom, thankfully. I'm so glad you are telling your family's story.
I’m sorry for all this abuse and feelings of shame and secrets that hurt. It’s sad how common this is around the world. Women still have so far to go to feel whole. Thank you Cherilyn for being willing to share and write and tell and help others.